Once you know the basics, the next step is to set some goals. What you need to do there is pick a couple of shoots you will attend, however local or beyond, and practice judging distance in the environment you will shoot. You also need to work with the targets you will shoot. Targets are expensive, but just a few would give you a huge leg up. The problem with judging outside the box like a soccer ball is that it doesn't transfer to the range. I am a good judge of yardage in an open field when there is a target that nobody has worked with a lot.

Last year I went to a bushy range where they had an Elk target at 51 yards, through a shooting lane that was total bush. It wasn't a hard shot in terms of threading the arrow, it was just a case of not being able to see a single piece of the intervening terrain. I have certainly shot a few elk targets, but i really can't judge range effectively by their size alone, and I couldn't visualy line it off. I used other techniques, but I had to hedge placement so I would have a more forgiving target, and I lost some points as a result.